Here are two recent comments I posted on my friend Flash's "Centrisity" blog-site (http://centrisity.blogspot.com/). They have to do with the "War On Terror" moniker, which I despise, even though I agree with eliminating al Qaeda as best we can. I reproduce them here (with a few corrections for clarity, as I initially wrote and posted them quite quicky) in order to document where I stand with regards to this on-going issue.
First, here are two notes regarding what I wrote:
1.) In COMMENT #1, I put "BIG SPENDERS" in all-caps because that's one of the accusations being leveled by some people at President Obama, even though the Iraq War, for instance, has required enormous payments of both American blood and American taxpayer money.
2.) The point of view is mine, which is to say that of one American citizen, so when I say "we" I am often referring to the United States.
And now, here are the comments....
COMMENT #1
I'd be more willing to consider a given argument about how to combat the dangers of the modern world if we all finally dropped the "War On Terror" title and got more specific regarding who and/or what we are fighting.
Terror is a tactic, not an enemy.
For example, when one attempts to "shock and awe" (as we did in Iraq) one is attempting to terrify, among other things. When one flies a plane into a building (as the al Qaeda terrorists did in New York), one is attempting to terrify, among other things.
Hence, terror is a strategic tactic that can be used for several purposes, good or bad. I obviously support our use of it when it makes sense, and I obviously disapprove of al Qaeda's use of it always.
But keeping this naive title "War On Terror" (which is so unspecific that it hasn't worked with public opinion outside of the U.S.) is what creates the sort of mass mental fuzziness that allowed the Bush Administration to conduct a war in Afghanistan as well as a war in Iraq.
The Afghan fight is the right one, and ought to be supported, whereas we mumbled ourselves into the Iraq fight by attaching it to this generalized "War On Terror."
If we are meant to fight actual, identifiable groups of radical Islamic terrorists (and those inspired by such groups), then let's always be specific about it and drop the junior-high "War On Terror" sloganeering. Thankfully, the Obama Administration seems to be moving in a direction that requires more specificity in these regards.
If we'd have done that before, maybe we'd have focused better on necessary targets and avoided being such BIG SPENDERS by attaching expensive wars of choice (Iraq) to necessary existing wars (Afghanistan).
COMMENT #2
"War On Terror" is so diffuse that it allows for multi-trillion-dollar wars of choice (Iraq) to be grouped in a general way with actual, necessary wars (Afghanistan).
Why is it that a lot of folks on the political right will complain (often legitimately) about the lack of specificity in domestic spending proposals, but are nonetheless happy to endlessly fund unspecific notions in the foreign policy arena, even though several such unspecific notions (leveraged with bogus discussions of patriotism) have proven to be incredibly costly, in more ways than one?
(The Iraq War and its aftermath, as it turns out, is more expensive than the domestic stimulus package. Meanwhile, Afghanistan has slid to the back-burner ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and as a result is at present a mess.)
I also disagree with this antique notion that suggests those who take issue with the knee-jerk conservative stance regarding this debate are somehow "worried about what others think more than what is good for America." I find that argument to be binary and overly-simplistic.
Let's wake up and smell the coffee, folks. Of late, more specificity (something like "...we are currently going after al Qaeda cells and groups inspired by them in the following countries/regions, and might expand that later, hopefully in careful consultation with other nations, if logic dictates it...") and less generality (encapsulated by such titles as "War On Terror," which sounds like a ride at Disneyland, along the lines of "Pirates of the Caribbean") has resulted in increased European pledges of military support for the Afghanistan scenario since President Obama took office. That seems like good, old-fashioned American pragmatism to me.
The reality is this: we're not always right, and neither are our allies. For instance, many of them should have gotten on-board the Afghan fight earlier, to be sure. But a lot of them were put-off by our subsequent sojourn into Iraq and by President Bush's incessant use of the term "War On Terror." (Hearing that, many wondered just what other country was the next to be invaded, and therefore wondered just what they might be getting involved with.) They were often petulant and condescending, which was annoying, but we were often naive and callow, which wasn't helpful, either.
Recent history suggests that others are sometimes willing to help in such endeavors when they are given specifics and are lent an ear, so to speak. Yet they tend to be unwilling to get caught up in expensive fights where reality is replaced with fuzzy sloganeering, even if the fight might be the right one.
So, the question we are left with seems to be this one: are we to continue projecting a self-aggrandizing and reductively righteous motif, which might leave us fighting alone? Or are we to show a bit of flexibility with our allies, and probably have more teammates with which to work, even if we are annoyed by them sometimes and only get 90% of what we want, instead of 100%?
Before we answer that, let's consider this: in the coming years, this will become an increasingly multi-polar world. This means that we are going to have to be increasingly savvy in an international context. That's not a liberal thing to say, or a conservative thing to say. That just IS.
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